Customer satisfaction and retention are critical for retail banks. Service quality
is a major determinant of customer satisfaction, and is increasingly being seen
as a key strategic differentiator within the financial services sector worldwide.
However, little is known about service quality in an African context for retail
banking.
This research assesses customer expectations based on service quality factors
for retail banks across ten countries in Africa. Specifically, the objectives are to
determine whether cross-national differences in customer service expectations
exist in the African retail banking sector, what the relative importance of key
service dimensions in African retail banking are, and whether these service
expectations are constant over time.
A questionnaire based survey of 4035 respondents across ten African countries
was used. The determinants of external service quality were identified, which
include service quality dimensions and respective underlying attributes. The
SERVQUAL model developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml & Berry (1990) was
adopted for modelling the data. The results were rescaled to interval data and
then analysed by way of ANOVA testing, t-testing and rank ordering.
The research shows, with the exception of the Responsiveness service
expectation dimension, that there are no commonalities of service expectations
among the African countries of this study. The implications of this are significant
for managers of multinational retail banks in Africa wishing to improve the quality of service delivery.
The Responsiveness service expectation dimension was found to consistently
be the most important expectation across all countries. Thereafter, the relative
importance of subsequent service dimensions varied considerably for each
country, but, on average, ranked as follows: Responsiveness, Reliability,
Tangibles, Assurance and, finally, Empathy.